The tone of the narrator and the tone of the novel are slightly distinct from one another. The narrator tends to take himself and his life seriously, describing his feelings and experiences in earnest as he critiques the racial politics of the United States. For example, in Chapter 5, he describes three different "classes" of Black people and vents his frustration at being grouped into what he sees as an unfavorable category when riding in Jim Crow cars:
To say that the whites are forced to ride in the superior car is less than a joke. And, too, odd as it may sound, refined colored people get no more pleasure out of riding with offensive Negroes than anybody else would get.
This comment has a mixed tone of frustration and snobbery. The narrator tries to break down the sociological reasons why Black people are supposedly stratified into the classes he enumerates. While there is plenty of room to criticize the contempt he holds for uneducated Black people, he is ultimately trying to refute the idea that Black people are naturally inferior to white people. He thinks of himself as a "refined colored person" and is angry that he is treated as an "offensive" person simply because he is Black. At the end of the novel, the narrator expresses ambivalence about his choice to pass as white. He is not sure that he would not have been better off living authentically as a Black man. But he is serious in tone as he expresses his ambivalence. He is mulling over what he has done with his life.
The novel, on the other hand, is often more sardonic in tone. While the narrator's critiques of society are in line with the novel's stance, the novel itself also presents the narrator as someone to be critiqued and even mocked as well. The very idea that he calls himself an "ex-colored man" is a joke, partially at his own expense. He can't do much to change his phenotype and ancestry, but he can change the way he presents himself socially. The issue is that presenting himself as "ex-colored" points to the very origins he is trying to hide in the first place. It is not a logical identity category in the real world. On top of this, if his phenotype can pass as white, there is a question of how well the category of "colored" ever applied to him to begin with. Johnson pokes fun of the narrator to point out that while American racial categories and politics have intense effects on people's lives, the categories and politics themselves are less logical than they might seem.
